


these bodies, they stay with us

by boarsnsmores



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-14
Updated: 2016-05-14
Packaged: 2018-06-08 10:42:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6851488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boarsnsmores/pseuds/boarsnsmores
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emma is found with a scar on her upper lip, but for 28 years no other scars appear on her body save for the ones she earns herself.</p><p>Regina wakes up one morning with a scar on her right knuckles, like she’d punched something and then hadn’t let it heal properly.</p><p>A soulmates AU where you share the scars of your soulmate(s).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. part i. Fate, all the same

**Author's Note:**

> This idea's been rattling around in my head for a month or two now, but I was supposed to write this after I finished _maybe the alantic would have been kinder_. However, I'm apparently taking my sweet time with that so I thought this would be a quick break.
> 
> (This was also supposed to be a 1k one-shot but that was never going to be true)
> 
> Anyway, kind of rough, feel free to correct my typos/weird run-ons.

**part i. Fate, all the same**

Emma is found with a scar on her upper lip.

When Emma is five, her foster mother is kinder than the ones who will come after. She pulls Emma up onto her lap and whispers into her hair, “It’s a promise, baby girl, from someone who’s watching and knows that your soul deserves love.” Emma falls asleep, lulled by the comfort promised in those words and her foster mother’s gentle rocking.

Emma remembers this fondly, but that foster mother had also given her up not long after, so it’s somewhat bittersweet.

When Emma is seven, She learns about the existence of soulmates from her classmates, who proudly show off their scars and brag about their soulmates. Emma can’t tell which scars are theirs and which are their soulmates’, but Emma’s had this scar on her lip since birth. When she runs her hand over it, she can believe that there’s someone out there waiting for her, who’ll belongs to her as much as she’ll belong to them. Family and happiness are guaranteed in her future and this is the undeniable proof.

She holds onto this belief, fiercely as she can, when she wakes up to mornings with bruised wrists, when the homes reek of ever-burning cigarettes and broken beer bottles, when there are too many mouths and not enough food, when they inevitably take her back. There’s someone out there who’ll care about her, who can’t give her up without giving a part of themself up, and wouldn’t want to give either up anyway.

Not much is immutable in this world for Emma, whose home changes every few months and for whom affection is a rare and bitter hope, but she is wanted, somewhere. This must be a certainty. It is absolute when Emma is eight, when she is nine, when soulmates find each other through scraped knees and elbows. It is still true when she is ten, when she is eleven, when there are too many scraped knees and elbows and soulmates find each other through mementos of childhood memories instead. It is only probable when she is twelve, when she is thirteen, when some carve their scars into arms and legs, just to know for certain.

When she is fourteen, the scar on her lip is just another promise that couldn’t be kept. Emma has spent seven years waking up to the hope that there’ll be another scar to find her soulmate by and every morning she has woken up disappointed. Emma’s grown up enough in these seven years to realize that soulmates are a fairy tale never meant for her. It hurts more than the families who’ve given her back hurt, but she guesses that’s what it means to have had a soulmate but also to have never really had them.

At fifteen, she punches a mirror in and they send her back, hand still wrapped in a bloody gauze. It scars over and Emma would feel bad for her soulmate, if they actually existed. But Emma’s soulmate is nothing more than a broken promise where there should only be absolute certainty, so instead she hopes it scars over ugly and obnoxious. If they’re out there, Emma’s reminding them she exists.

Fuck whoever’s watching, she decides.

When she is sixteen, she meets Neal and they have more good days than they do bad days. She is still young enough to see a future ahead of her, with something like family and happiness. Neal isn’t her soulmate but he’s present, which is more than she can say for her soulmate. He asks one day, when she confesses love and dreams of happily ever after, why she’s not finding her soulmate and everything she’s ever wanted along the way.

“They’re dead.” Emma says, and nothing more. Neal lets it go and then a year later, leaves her too. It doesn’t hurt as much as it should, just another family and Emma remembers, just as quickly as she’d forgotten, how she hasn’t had faith in those for some time now. She won’t forget for some time after, the scar on her lip in the mirror a permanent reminder that the world is equal parts cruel and unforgiving and that it has never once deemed her worthy of its promises.

She gives birth to a healthy baby boy six months later. He is perfect, not a single scar on his small and frail body. She wants him to be perfect for as long as he can, and when (when, not if) the scars come, hopes that they don’t stop coming. She cannot be who he needs, so she sends him away with the wishes of her dashed childhood and takes in return the scars of her pregnancy with her, another family that could never be.

When she is eighteen, they release her from juvie and she re-enters the world with only a beat-up yellow Bug and some spare change. It is enough. Emma has spent an entire lifetime surviving by herself and she will spend another ten years doing the same. She is, after all, very good at it. For these ten years, her scars are wholly her own and she carries them like badges of honor, trophies of her victories in her fight against a world that would see her broken and defeated.

When she is just barely twenty-eight, someone knocks on her door, late in the night. She opens the door to see hope, tenuous and fragile, in the face of a boy half her size whom she has only known by the marks he had left on her.

“I’m your son. I’m Henry.” He tells her and her traitorous, traitorous heart remembers, just as quickly as it’d forgotten, how to be hopeful again. His eyes linger a little longer than they should on the scar on her lip. Something changes in his gaze, but he says nothing, only frowns slightly in a way that reminds her of love and other things that could never be.

Family and happiness, she tells herself as they drive to the middle of nowhere (Storybrooke, Maine). Once, a lonely decade ago, she had given up this boy so that he could find the things she could not give him and his scars on her body have haunted her ever since. Perhaps she was never meant to follow the whimsies of fate, who had carelessly promised her a soulmate at her birth and never saw fit to lead her to them. Perhaps she was meant to find these things for herself, to wrest them from a world that has given her nothing she has not clawed from it these twenty-eight years.

Henry runs up the pathway to a grand house and Emma is grateful that he has known family and happiness where she has not.

The door opens and Emma meets the woman’s eyes first before her lips, but when she does - oh, in that moment there spans an eternity. Emma can only gape and drag a single word out.

“Hi.”

Perhaps it was fate, all the same.


	2. part ii. Pacts with Old Gods

**part ii. Pacts with Old Gods**

Regina opens her eyes to a new world, where there now exists a small town called Storybrooke which she reigns over as Mayor. Snow White (Mary Margaret here) flees whenever she sees Regina on the street, her true love lies in a coma in a hospital, and he gave his marriage vows to someone else. Victory has never been so satisfyingly complete and Regina basks in it.

For seven years, Regina relishes in her power over the town and schedules more meetings than strictly necessary with Mary Margaret, just to watch her squirm. It is the best life she could have had, dragged out from the ashes of her childhood innocence, and Regina settles into its rhythm. She tells herself it is enough.

It’s a lie she can believe until suddenly, there is a boy and his father. Then there were neither and she is homesick for a life she never lived, a bitter and ugly scar where her heart should be, healing over the empty space until it infests her lungs.

_“I love you.” she tells him, voice breathless._

_“True Love, right?” he asks her, half in nervous jest, half in tentative hope._

_“The Truest.” She says, wholeheartedly. “Until we are both dead and buried.” She adds, for they are both still young enough to believe._

_Daniel dies and when she kisses him, his eyes remain closed. When she remembers his eyes, she remembers them in fear and pain. She cannot remember True Love or hope in them but she is sure that they were there, scars carved into her heart so deeply that they should have split it._

_(Maybe they did. Until we are both dead and buried, she had promised. She is not dead and he is not buried and so they carry on, both only half-alive)_

Sometimes, she thinks she is more dead than Daniel, who slumbers peacefully, forever captured in a moment when their love was still True enough. How does one live without their soulmate?

(She still believes that it will be enough - where faith had failed them, she will not.)

Then, she wakes up one morning to a scar on her left elbow and knee.

* * *

“Well, I suppose congratulations are in order.” Dr. Whale tells her when she goes to ensure that no, this isn’t just a cancerous growth (this might be preferable - at least they can cure cancer here). “If you’re lucky,” he continues as she stares at the wall in...something, “they’ll be nearby and not in the middle of nowhere. Going to finally take a vacation, Madam Mayor?”

“Mind your own business.” She snaps at him before brushing out.

“Most people would be happy!” He calls out to her back in that infuriatingly smug voice of his.

Regina instead downs a shot of her hardest liquor and throws the glass against a wall before she calls for her secretary to schedule a meeting with Mary Margaret.

(Her heart beats hollow in her chest and she cancels her meeting with Mary Margaret fifteen minutes before its scheduled.)

She is aware that soulmates are marked in this world, yes - it would be hard not to, considering their prominence in the media. She first saw it on _The Dating Game_ , which confused her to no end until she realized that everyone was watching for the contestant to pick someone who wasn’t their soulmate. It was a rigged game - sometimes the options didn’t include the person’s soulmate and sometimes it did and the person didn’t pick right. Broken hearts in exchange for network numbers.

There had been no point in hoping to find scars on her body because the only person who could leave them wasn’t in a position to.

(She wonders if these rules of magic applied to their world, if she would have had Daniel’s scars from riding, if Daniel would have kept the scars her mother removed with magic, if seeing their shared scars would have stopped her mother from ripping out his heart.)

(It wouldn’t have, but she is often homesick for a life she almost had.)

The weight of Fate leaves a sour taste in the back of her mouth and she stops watching the show.

She had revisited the issue when she discovered the _The Jerry Springer Show_ , an apparently incredibly popular serial about all the ways people made irrevocable disasters of their lives. It’s oddly cathartic. She had paid the notion of soulmates no stock then still, for she had no scars and it only validated what she already knew - Daniel had been her True Love, soulmate, whatever word they gave it.

(Is, she corrects. Is her True Love and soulmate)

But now there is a scar on her elbow and one on her knee and she sits at the rim of her bathtub to stare at them. They are innocuous mars on her skin, a token of a childhood she may have lived, small enough to fit inside the hollow of her chest, but they are not hers to take (yet here they are, hers now anyway).

She visits Daniel, under her town of blood and sacrifice, and whispers, “I chose you.”

“I chose you,” she whispers again, more to herself than to him (because he is still young enough to believe). She is not, but she must believe anyway. This is her victory and she’ll have it, no matter how empty she feels.

Regina curses whatever fool decided that pacts with Old Gods were the best way to find happiness, meaning, or whatever asininely vague term they negotiated for. She’s sure some Old God is still laughing at them after all this time.

Fate had taken away everything from her and from its greedy hands she tore away her realm into another world so as to escape it. She decides to ignore these scars, small reminders that she remains still a pawn of Fate.

She can ignore the scabs on her knees and elbows (who is this person, who seems to scrape against the world so often), she can ignore the burns on her arm (as if whoever this was hadn’t brushed away smoldering coals quickly enough), she can ignore the etching on her feet (she wonders why this person would run themselves through until they cut their feet).

Fifteen years into her curse, she cannot ignore the ugly scar that traces its way across her right knuckles, a spiderweb of memories. It looms, ever-present in the daylight hours, an absence she does not know how to feel. She curls her fist and she can see this fist smashing into something, perhaps a mirror or a window, glass cutting as it dug its nails into flesh and refused to let go.

(Once, when she was very young, she broke a mirror in a tantrum. Mother had healed her, then ensured she never threw another tantrum. This is not a scar from that memory, but she does not have the memories of this scar to fill its stead.)

If Fate is to take this away from her too, if she is meant to fill this hole in her chest with its whims, then it will be on her terms. There is no space in her chest for whoever has written themselves onto her skin.

“I need your help.” She tells Mr. Gold. It will take three years. In that time, she reluctantly accumulates a myriad of small scars, souvenirs of another life she has not lived.

One day, she wakes up to the scars of childbirth and cannot stop the pang of jealousy she feels.

(These are not scars she could ever have - she ensured that many years ago, a piece of herself torn out, another price paid so that she could escape her mother’s machinations.)

(How much of herself is left, she wonders, that all she has to show on her body are the scars of another life)

A year later, she holds Henry, and briefly wonders if, wherever her soulmate is, she and her child are at the very least, together and happy. But only briefly, between the time it takes for her to meet Henry and for him to fill up whatever space remained in her chest for things like family and happiness, chasing away the empty loneliness.

(The irony will not escape her, later on)

Regina can almost forget, most days, that there are soulmates and Fate in this world because Henry is everything. It should have been Henry, she thinks, who shared her scars. She cannot imagine a world where she would have loved her soulmate more than she loves Henry.

Then Henry falls ill and Dr. Whale tells her to find his birth mother.

She does so but there is no room in her chest for anyone else but Henry, who must be everything because what does she have left?

(If not Henry, then Daniel because this town of blood and sacrifice still stands, a lonely grave for her heart, which stopped beating when his stopped. It could never be anyone else.)

* * *

Regina wakes up one morning with a scar on her right knuckles, like she’d punched something and then hadn’t let it heal properly. Whoever it was, she curses, shouldn’t have made a pact with Old Gods but they did and they weren’t even considerate enough to do a good job of it.

Sometimes, when she is tired and Henry is fussy, she will imagine a world where she and Daniel love Henry in equal vast, immeasurable quantities. Together, they live a life where none of them know the kind of pain and loss it takes to drive a person to desperate deals, signed and paid for in blood. It does not hurt so much, to imagine a life so improbable.

When Henry is three, Regina finds another scar on her abdomen. It scores a jagged ridge across where her soulmate’s child has left their mark, creating a cross on her left hip. She traces it in the mirror and wonders if this is her soulmate’s dying scar. Her soulmate answers her idle question with a small pocket in Regina’s right shoulder, a year later. For the next five years, there are other small signs of fights fought with knives and guns (and in one instance, Regina suspects a broken beer bottle) instead of fists and Regina goes from passing curiosity to vexed irritation.

How does Fate think Regina would ever fall for someone stupid enough not to avoid a fight she couldn’t win? To her soulmate’s credit, she apparently survives her fights, and the scars stop coming in as frequently. Regina still thinks she shouldn’t have been in the fights if she couldn’t win them soundly.

From when Henry is eight until he is ten, no more scars come in, and the idea of soulmates and Fate fall away until Henry discovers the Book, and her world falls apart once more. She chose Henry, just like she had chosen Daniel, but perhaps this is another love she cannot keep. Perhaps another realm wasn’t enough to escape Fate, which followed her here from the Enchanted Forest to ensure she played out the role it cast her in. She traces the cross on her left side and the pitted circle on the other and wonders what if’s, who, lives that almost were and could never be.

Henry runs away and when she sees him again, heart no longer empty and beating wildly in her too-full chest, he’s next to some (very tight) jeans and -

A spiderweb of memories tracing their way across her knuckles and -

A scar, her scar, her only physical evidence of her life lived and -

“You’re Henry’s birth mother?”

Regina curses whoever made that pact with Old Gods.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, I'm [somewhere on tumblr](http://boarsnsmores.tumblr.com/).
> 
> The physics of soulmates (and also the far reach of its implications) always confound me, so you should let me know if something I wrote is just _too_ implausible. At some point I just threw up my hands and yelled 'MAGIC' at my computer.
> 
> Epilogue (hopefully) soon-ish.


End file.
